Archive for July, 2010

You may not know about it, but ShadowProtect comes with a handy utility called ShadowProtect ImageManager™. It comes with most versions of ShadowProtect, except ShadowProtect IT Edition™ and ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange™.

ShadowProtect ImageManager works with servers and with desktops and has several cool features that can really help you manage your backup image files. If you’re taking several backups each day, as you should, these backup image files can start eating up your disk space pretty fast, unless you have a way to manage them.

That’s why ShadowProtect ImageManager allows you to automatically consolidate point-in-time backup image files. Once you set it up, it can collapse all your daily images into one “daily” file. Then, each week it can collapse those “daily” files into one “weekly” file. And then it will collapse those “weekly” files into a “monthly” file. This helps minimize disk space. This is why we recommend that you set your ShadowProtect backups to perform “continuous incrementals.” Then it’s easy for ShadowProtect ImageManager to help you save disk space and collapse those incremental files each day, week and month.

In addition, ShadowProtect ImageManager will verify and re-verify your backup images. This way you can be certain all of your backups are in a good state, just in case you need them to recover your system.

Finally, you can also set up ShadowProtect ImageManager to track the status of your backups and notify you in the event of a backup job success — or failure. Now you can know right away if something goes wrong.

Earlier this year, StorageCraft also introduced a new version of ShadowProtect ImageManager, called ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™. It’s designed specifically for servers and has two additional features – HeadStart Restore™ and image verification. In our next blog article, we’ll spend some time explaining those features and its additional per-server licensing requirements.

A new version of StorageCraft ShadowProtect is available: ShadowProtect 4.0.1. It has several feature enhancements, including improvements to VirtualBoot™, an improved Recovery Wizard in the StorageCraft Recovery Environment and updated help links. There’s a lot more detail about the new things in ShadowProtect 4.0.1 in the ReadMe file, which you can check out online.

You can download a 30-day trial version of ShadowProtect Server, ShadowProtect Small Business Server or ShadowProtect Desktop from the ShadowProtect software trials Web page. You may also update your existing version of ShadowProtect from the ShadowProtect software updates page.

As always, if you need more information about a specific ShadowProtect product, you may visit one of the following product pages:

ShadowProtect Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectServer

ShadowProtect Small Business Server™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectSBS

ShadowProtect Desktop™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectDesktop

ShadowProtect ImageManager Enterprise™ – http://www.storagecraft.com/ShadowProtectIME

If you’ve ever thought about setting up a network at home or even been so ambitious as to set up a small office network, you know that it isn’t simple or straight forward. Getting everything  running smoothly requires time, patience and several bottles of aspirin.

PC Magazine recently put together a how-to guide giving you some tips and tricks to make the process a little smoother. This guide explains the kind of storage to get and how to protect it.

You can set up your own local backup system given enough external storage space. If you’re going to take this course, we recommend creating not just a backup, but a whole drive image – —that is, a backup of not just your data, but your entire PC— – everything from your files to all the tweaks you make to your OS and apps so that they perform the way you want them to. The best software for this, hands down, is ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0.

Check out the entire article and pick up a few pointers. You may even have some of your own that the article doesn’t highlight. You can always share them here and give others the benefit of your wisdom and experience.

If you’ve recently purchased StorageCraft ShadowProtect  for the first time, you may not know how to create a recovery CD. You’ll need a  CD with the StorageCraft Recovery Environment in case you ever need to restore a system — whether it’s a server or a desktop/laptop.  If you downloaded the software from the StorageCraft Web site, you received some instructions on how to do this, but you may not have understood why you need to do this now. Basically it boils down to this: if you wait until you need the recovery disk (say, following a catastrophic failure), it will be a little more difficult to create the CD. It’s always so much easier to have it handy before the disaster.

So here’s what to do. After downloading ShadowProtect, load a blank CD into your CD/DVD drive. Now navigate to the folder where you saved your ShadowProtect 4 download, unzip the file and you’ll see a .ISO image file.  Open your CD burning software and then browse to the .ISO file and burn this to your CD. Once it’s burned, make sure you label it ShadowProtect Recovery CD and put it in a safe place.

Most CD burning software are able to create a CD from an .ISO file, but there are some free tools available to do this, too: ISOTool.exe is a tool included with ShadowProtect and Active @ISO Burner is a free tool you can download at: http://www.ntfs.com/iso_burner_free.htm.

Small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) have unique challenges when it comes to backing up, restoring, searching or migrating their Exchange database (EDB) files. These challenges are often pricey and protracted – issues that can bring productivity to a screeching halt.

Not only is it important to backup the entire server, but it is also important to have a way to restore mailboxes and individual e-mail messages and attachments quickly and easily.  This has been a complex problem because current Exchange backup solutions don’t address all requirements from complete restore of an Exchange database down to the granular recovery of an individual e-mail message or e-mail attachment.

Another issue for SMBs is complying with regulatory or legal demands regarding the production of e-mail records. Searching e-mail databases for individual messages based on specific criteria can be an incredibly time-consuming task that most small businesses can ill afford. Restoring individual databases, then painstakingly searching for keywords, messages to certain domains or recipients, messages sent on specified dates or with specified subjects can take days – or even weeks – to complete.

Finally, upgrading to a new Exchange server can frustrate IT staff with its complexity and potential for disaster. The migration process can place a heavy load on SMBs with limited IT resources.

Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Exchange servers.

There’s a reason we keep telling you that ShadowProtect is award-winning backup, disaster recovery and system migration software. The coveted PC Magazine Editors’ Choice award is the latest accolade and we’re proud to accept it! Once again ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0 is the backup software winner. The full article highlights new features, like VirtualBoot™, as well as the tried and tested features that make ShadowProtect such a consistenly reliable way to backup your desktop or laptop.

For years, StorageCraft’s ShadowProtect Desktop has been PC Magazine Editors’ Choice for drive imaging, and version 4.0 upholds the tradition. ShadowProtect Desktop 4.0 features unchanged core features as well as new features that make it easier and faster to get your system up and running from a backup even after a complete hardware breakdown makes your original hardware unusable.

You can check out Edward Mendelson’s complete review at pcmag.com, which starts with a reminder about the importance of backing up your PC. Have you heard that somewhere before?

In addition, there’s a slide show that will take you through some of the product screen shots. It shows several of products wizards and explains how the software works. It’s definitely worth a look.

Maximizing business continuity while protecting critical data can be especially challenging for small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Most data protection systems are designed for large enterprise environments, which do not work for SMBs. For smaller businesses, resources are especially limited, and administrators cannot afford to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for expensive continuous data protection (CDP) solutions. But having a server out of commission isn’t an option either.

In addition, many data protection solutions overlook the critical component of the recovery time objective (RTO). Your RTO is the maximum amount of time your systems can be out of commission – from when a disruption occurs to the moment your system is available again. Minimizing your RTO helps you avoid the consequences of a long-term break in business continuity.

Unfortunately, most backup and recovery strategies are bound by technological limitations. When your server has many terabytes (TB) of data that must be recovered – not to mention the operating system and applications – it takes many hours to restore everything from the original volume, even at relatively rapid disk speeds.

Cloud computing and off-site replication can help address concerns about data security and help ensure that information is available following a catastrophe. But again, these types of security solutions are often unavailable to SMBs due to their complexity and their costs.

Plus, IT administrators working for SMBs rarely have the time or the resources to managecomplex backup systems that require extensive certifications or hours of training to understand. But having a clear picture of your backup resources, knowing whether backups are successful and minimizing the resources required for ongoing data protection are imperative.

Download this white paper to learn more about each of these issues, why they are important for SMBs to address and how to resolve them while maximizing business continuity, protecting critical data and minimizing IT resources necessary to accomplish the demands of maintaining Windows servers.